Shelf Awareness reports that longtime Eagle Harbor Book Company bookseller Ann Combs passed away earlier this month. Combs was an author and a columnist, but she had settled into a career at Eagle Harbor over the last two decades. She had "retired less than a week before" she passed away, Shelf Awareness reports — a bookseller to the very end. Combs was 84.

I very much enjoyed Seattle author Paul Tumey's beautiful comics history book Screwball! I'll be running an interview with Tumey in a few weeks, but for right now, you should read this Comics Journal interview with him and plan to attend Tumey's reading at Third Place Books Ravenna on October 26th.

Stephen King's house is Bangor, Maine, is becoming an author archive and writer's retreat. Say what you will about the quality of King's prose — I will never forgive him for the end of Under the Dome — but he certainly uses his celebrity for good and not evil.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt laid off nearly ten percent of its workforce. There's been so much bad publishing and media news along these lines over the last year that I shudder to think what will happen in the next recession.

White House adviser Peter Navarro made up a character and used that character to parrot his talking points in several of his non-fiction titles. Navarro called the character, named "Ron Vara," a "whimsical device." His publisher is very upset.

Speaking of politics, this tweet says it all about that book that's supposedly written by an anonymous "resister" in the Trump administration:

Fuck, and I cannot say this strongly enough, this book. https://t.co/taqau3yra5

— Maris Kreizman (@mariskreizman) October 22, 2019